As organisations from all sectors come to rely more on knowledge-intensive resources and technology for value creation, it is clear that an organisation's ability to foster, manage and profit from the knowledge of its people and their capacity to innovate will be the key to its future success.

However, as an economy and a nation we are challenged to find meaningful, consistent and reliable ways to successfully deal with these things often called "intangibles". As managers, leaders and citizens, we must explore and address the challenge of understanding value in this new knowledge-based era. Managing a business, government agency or an economy in this time requires new understanding and skills if we are to continue to prosper.

 At its most obvious, when unmeasured, intangible assets amount to unmanaged risk.

The debate on the perceived need to measure the value of organisational intangible assets has been around for over 30 years. But the complexity of the issue has consistently obscured the benefit of numerous attempts to bring accounting and valuation practices up to date with the realities of the post-industrial economy. In the balance-sheet approach to the world, intangible assets – be they human resources, processes, brands, intellectual capital, customer goodwill or the value of IT-underpinned productivity, are somehow considered to be divorced from the cash-flow. They are therefore deemed irrelevant in determining a company’s current or future value. 

In the parlance of the finance community, which rewards profitability (or an appearance of it) over any other aspect of company performance, the intangibles conundrum is no conundrum at all.